Yeah, I get that paranoid side-eye for posting on my blog and importing to Medium, but see, I OWN MY BLOG. I own my blog, and I own my content.
I do not give a flying fuck how honest and sincere the Medium people seem. We’ve heard all the same before — before the LJ Strikethrough of ’07, before Blogger/Google erased Dennis Cooper, before facebook closed/deleted accounts owned by people with not-white-sounding names, and now, tragically, with tumblr deleting the wonderful blog “ArchAtlas”.
If your work is hosted by someone who is NOT YOU, then you are at risk of losing it. You are at risk of losing all your original work if you have not backed it up, exported it, copied it, whatever.
My solution to this is to post at my own blog (which I host myself, which costs, and I know not everyone can afford that) and crosspost. I save backups of my blog. Even if my hosting company goes down in flames, I still have my content.
There are other solutions, of course, but the point remains: make sure you have a “local copy” of your original content (that is, a copy of it that is somewhere you own, even if it is just the flashdrive on your keychain).
The thing is, blogs/accounts are deleted all the time. ALL THE TIME. And sometimes for good reasons — valid copyright infringement, illegal media, etc. But the sweep that these huge corporations use to catch the real bad guys is absolutely without remorse or merit, to be honest. They blaze through a group of sites and anything remotely suspicious is frozen or deleted. It is a good business decision for them, honestly–it immediately lessens their liability. That’s ALL THEY CARE ABOUT.
You are not important to them. Your individual account is not important to them. Your hard work and creative effort is not important to them.
SAVE YOUR SHIT, trust no one.
